Proposal description

This proposal is to allow the core team to purchase an annual subscription to WebEx's Premium 100 web conferencing product. While many free services exist on the market, the scale of our operations have outgrown the free options. At this stage, the effectiveness of the team and our professionalism with outside vendors and business partners is unacceptably impacted. We also desire the ability to hold larger calls with a broad audience including quarterly updates for the community.

What issues have you faced with the free services? Have you tried using x yet?

There are numerous quality issues we are encountering as the core team's activities grow. As more core team members shift to full-time along with the addition of the Evolution development team and the frequent addition of third party participants (e.g., vendors and business partners), core team calls are beginning to reach the limits of what free offerings can support. This results in inefficient calls that require recovering topics, and us looking very unprofessional when meeting with third parties.

We now frequently have dropped calls, participants unable to hear, participants unable to be heard, dial-in numbers not functioning, and packet loss / sound quality issues. Free tools simply fail with more than 3-5 participants.

We have tried many free product versions, including (but not limited to) Skype, WebEx, Google Hangouts, and GoToMeeting. They have all generated the same issues.

Why are we suggesting such a high-capacity plan?

The WebEx Premium 100 allows up to 100 participants to join a conference. With a high-capacity web conferencing tool, we plan to not only solve the call quality issues, but actually introduce new chances for the community to interact with the core team. Here are the many uses we have planned for the subscription. Several of these will require a high-capacity plan.

Dash core team meetings, including our full-team weekly meeting

Dash Foundation calls

Dash Foundation annual member meeting

Project-specific calls

Calls with business partners and vendors

Quarterly calls with the community (probably starting this or next quarter), including presentations and Q&amp;A

The incremental cost of the Premium 100 plan is just $10 / month incremental expense over the Premium 25 plan. For that cost, we can obtain access to another effective communication channel with the community.